Clifford Irving

[Roman Kudryashov]

Clifford Irving

Irving grew up in New York City, the son of Dorothy and Jay Irving, a
magazine cover artist and the creator of the syndicated comic strip
Pottsy, about a New York policeman. After graduating in 1947 from
Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, Irving attended Cornell
University, had a two-year marriage (to Nina Wilcox) and worked on his
first novel, On a Darkling Plain (Putnam, 1956) while he was a copy
boy at The New York Times. He completed his second novel, The Losers
(1958), as he traveled about Europe. While living on the island of
Ibiza he met an Englishwoman, Claire Lydon, and they married in 1958,
moving to California. She was killed in Big Sur in an automobile
accident.

On a Darkling Plain and The Losers were not financially successful but
received excellent reviews. On a Darkling Plain was sometimes compared
with another novel set at Cornell, Charles Thompson's Halfway Down the
Stairs (1957). John O. Lyons, in an addendum to his 1962 survey, "The
College Novel in America: 1962-1974" (Critique, 1974) saw a tendency
toward pranks and put-ons in Irving's early work:

    Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966)
continues the iconoclastic Cornell Bildungsroman of the fifties by
Clifford Irving, On a Darkling Plain (1956); Charles Thompson, Halfway
Down the Stairs (1957); and Robert Gutwillig, After Long Silence
(1958). The oscillation between Weltschmerz and pranks in these novels
was undoubtedly an influence on "The Whole Sick Crew" of Pynchon's V.

Irving himself says this is "all nonsense."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Irving
http://www.richardandmimi.com/litcrit.html